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Vaccine breakthrough means no more chasing strains

Scientists at UC Riverside have demonstrated a new, RNA-based vaccine strategy that is effective against any strain of a virus and can be us

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Scientists at UC Riverside have demonstrated a new, RNA-based vaccine strategy that is effective against any strain of a virus and can be used safely even by babies or the immunocompromised.  Every year, researchers try to predict the four influenza strains that are most likely to be prevalent during the upcoming flu season. And every year, people line up to get their updated vaccine, hoping the researchers formulated the shot correctly. The same is true of COVID vaccines, which have been reformulated to target sub-variants of the most prevalent strains circulating in the U.S. This new strategy would eliminate the need to create all these different shots, because it targets a part of the viral genome that is common to all strains of a virus. The vaccine, how it works, and a demonstration of its efficacy in mice is described in a paper published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.  “What I want to emphasize about this vaccine strategy is that it is broad,” said UCR virologist and paper author Rong Hai. “It is broadly applicable to any number of viruses, broadly effective against any variant of a virus, and safe for a broad spectrum of people. This could be the universal vaccine that we have been looking for.”

Equal rights for women were anchored in the constitution right from the very beginning of the GDR. The 1949 constitution states simply: ‘Men and women are equal.’ In 1950, the GDR introduced a specific law (Gesetz über die Rechte der Frau) with the aim of securing the rights of women and protecting mothers. It stated that ‘marriage must not result in a reduction of women’s rights’. It emphasised the need for support in training and professional development for women and made any dismissal because of pregnancy illegal. The reasoning behind this law was given as making ‘it possible for women to take part in creative work for society, in local and national government, in political as well as cultural areas in both towns and villages’.

The law of 1950 guaranteed not only financial support for mothers; crucially, it gave single mothers the same rights as married ones. In contrast, even as late as the 1990s, single mothers in the Republic of Ireland were being punished because of the influence and political dominance, of the Catholic Church. [...]

Further rights for women were granted under a new law that came into force in 1965, initiated by the first female Secretary of State for Justice, Hilde Benjamin. This gave women the right to develop their own career paths through training and qualification. It also simplified the regulations regarding divorce, abolishing the notion of guilt and replacing it with the ‘break-up principle’, e.g. if a husband attempted to prevent his wife following her own career choices. In contrast, in the Federal Republic, up until 1976, men were the sole owners of property, had the sole legal right in terms of decision-making regarding children, and a married woman was only able to work with the permission of her husband and ‘if her domestic duties did not suffer as a result.’ Women in the FRG tended to stay at home once they started a family with the result that only 50 per cent of women worked. Unlike women in the GDR, those with children in the FRG if they worked, tended to work part-time, and many who worked full-time did not have children. [...]

1972 was an important year for the emancipation of women in the GDR. Abortion was made legal and free contraception became available for all women above the age of 16. Maternity leave, paid at 90 per cent of salary, was increased from 14 to 18 weeks (to be increased to 26 weeks in 1976). In addition, the payment of 1,000 Marks (more than a month’s average salary) was introduced on the birth of a baby as support for the parent/s. Furthermore, young couples under the age of 26 were granted interest-free loans of 5,000 Marks. [...]

Because of women’s new sense of freedom from the worries of the costs of bringing up children and funding their care, the birth rate in the GDR was healthy, unlike in the Federal Republic where it soon fell below the population replacement rate. Most young women in the GDR could and did choose to have children and work at the same time.

After only 20 years of the GDR’s existence, 34 per cent of judges in the GDR were women (in the FRG 6 per cent) and in 1988, this figure had increased to more than 50 per cent, and one third of women worked in technical professions. At the same time, women in the GDR held the post of mayor in 1,172 towns and villages (out of 9,021); in contrast, in the FRG, there were only 12 women mayors (out of a total of 14,869 towns and villages). It is perhaps essential to note here that ‘mayors’ in Germany are the leading local administrative officials not, as in Britain, merely ceremonial figures.

One other aspect of life in the GDR, which had a particularly positive impact on women and their sense of self worth, but which is often neglected, was the absence of mass advertising. Cynics would argue that the country had no advertising because it had no consumer goods worth advertising. While it is true that there was not a superfluity of goods that needed advertising to sell them, there was also a conscious determination not to encourage consumerism as an end in itself. This, of course, meant that women were not continually confronted with impossible role models to aspire to in terms of physical beauty or possessions, and their sexuality was not exploited for promoting sales. Rather than the plethora of women’s magazine stacked high on newsagents’ shelves in the West, with their never-ending fashion and cosmetics tips and cooking recipes, in the GDR women readers were treated as normally intelligent and independent beings with a broad spectrum of interests. The most widely-read women’s magazine, Für Dich, had a circulation of almost a million. Not only were all the journalists working for it, including the editor, women, the stories they featured were about women of the present and the past, of women at work, women artists or sportswomen. Women in the GDR were thus able to navigate society as individuals, on a par with men, and had no pressures on them to conform to any advertiser’s fantasy of the dream woman.